


A place of peril

by Goonlalagoon



Series: Just a bunch of kids with badges [9]
Category: Leagues and Legends - E. Jade Lomax
Genre: F/M, I just have a lot of feelings about Mari, Includes mentions of death but not of named characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-05-12 12:52:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19229512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goonlalagoon/pseuds/Goonlalagoon
Summary: The Giantkiller peered around with bright eyed interest at the mossy floor, the gnarled tree trunks, and the no nonsense glare levelled at him down an arrow.“You know, back home? We say your territory is only as big as the area you can keep safe.”Maid Marian raised one delicate eyebrow, unimpressed.“And everything beneath these trees is ours, boy, so answer the question.”(A character backstory piece for Maid Marian)





	A place of peril

The Giantkiller peered around with bright eyed interest at the mossy floor, the gnarled tree trunks, and the no nonsense glare levelled at him down an arrow.

“You know, back home? We say your territory is only as big as the area you can keep safe.”

Maid Marian raised one delicate eyebrow, unimpressed.

“And _everything_ beneath these trees is ours, boy, so answer the question.”

—

The woods had been a place of peril, for generations upon generations. Marian had lived in a town, with safe stone walls, safe paved streets, safe behind her uncle’s locked doors. 

Robin had lived wherever his family went, a life of warm red cloaks and warm red blood. In no world could werewolf hunting be considered safe; but his fingers on a bowstring and silver arrow tips glinting at the edges of his vision was the safest he had ever felt.

Marian had lived safe behind her uncle’s sturdy walls and locked doors, but she had looked out. She couldn’t see the woods from her window, quite, but she could see other things - the ramshackle houses that crowded against the inner walls, cluttered and crumbling, the way they were buried in the mountain snows while she kicked her blanket off because she was too warm under her layers of soft bedding.

Her uncle was responsible for the town, in name, but Marian _felt_ it - powerless, restricted, a dainty ward supposed to think of nothing but her dancing and her delicate stitches, she broke into her uncle’s study and read reports of infrastructure damage, diseases and death tolls, the ways the people outside the walls of their home were suffering, and clenched her empty, useless hands. She made notes of what might be needed, what could be done, who could be helped. Her uncle ignored every suggestion that wasn’t genteel charity, so she started slipping out to get her hands dirty when she was fifteen. She was met with suspicion and scepticism, but she started small - we all start out small.

She convinced the cook to let her carry the basket and join her in the market, a rough cloak hiding her oldest (but still fine) dress. She listened to what gossip didn’t cut off in her earshot, and to what prices were fair. She slipped coins from the purse tucked into her cloak to the baker who brought their bread, the greengrocer the cook favoured, and asked them to see that her purchases went to someone who needed it. She overpaid, enough to cover their efforts but not enough to offend. When she sat with her flashing needle and folds of soft cloth, that autumn, she also had a pile of mending beneath her chair, hidden behind her skirts. When her uncle patted her on the head and hurried off to a meeting, she smiled and bid him farewell, and pulled rough cloth into her hands. She tore up old skirts and learnt to make patchwork quilts from cloth too fine for their poor and vulnerable to wear without raising question. 

Robin didn’t know her, then. He wouldn’t meet her until the next winter, his knees pressed into cold ground and a town guard scowling at him, the hem of her rustling skirts picking up snowmelt and her breath frosting in the air, her chin lifted in dismissal.

He spent that autumn the way he had any other, tanning werewolf hides and tracking their never ending foe. The Riding Hoods rarely stopped in villages overnight, but sometimes they frequented an inn for the evening, listening for rumours of teeth and blood, for hints that the Bureau may be on their trail. Robin grinned widely at grudging youths and winked at worshipful ones.

When someone jumped him in the stables, in the hallway, between two buildings, he took them down quick and hard, pressed a knife to their throat and told them cheerfully that behaviour like that could get you killed. When they challenged him upfront to fights - friendly competition, naturally, nothing the authorities would need to worry about, just a little contest of skills for a bit of fun - he took them down hard and fast, unless things had seemed particularly tense. Then he went down, not easy but not hard enough to hurt, and towed them to the bar after, slapping their backs warmly and pretending to duck his family’s mocking jokes so that everyone could laugh and trade stories, taut shoulders relaxing on both sides. 

  
The forest was dangerous, and even they skirted through its edges unless on the tail of a rampaging monster. Things lurked in shadows, and so did bandits. But Robin liked the trees - the way they slowed the snow, their arching branches overhead, the maze of rabbit runs through the undergrowth.

Marian was stumbling through learning how to help without it being charity, slipping into her uncle’s study to read reports she wasn’t supposed to care about. Her hands were still smooth and soft, but her feet were growing calloused from walking through town in borrowed boots. She sat in ramshackle houses reading aloud to gathered children while their parents ran errands, did chores, or simply took a moment of peace to nap. In the purse tucked amongst her fine skits, she hid sweet tarts from breakfast and offered them up as treats, as thanks for giving her shelter and company. She brushed the crumbs from her fingers and told herself her hands were empty only because she had given away everything she was carrying.

Robin’s people hunted werewolves, saved lives, but they rarely offered any other assistance. They were a harsh people, by necessity. Werewolves were monsters, but they had been people once, too.  Unless chased away, the wolves tended to lurk around their home territories, so werewolf killers were rarely welcome in the places they saved. But they rode past villages with no defences, houses that had been raided by bandits, homes that were too short on firewood to last the winter, and his hands felt weighed down, felt empty.

The winter after Marian turned sixteen, she met Robin. She had been frantically reading reports for weeks of sheep vanishing from the nearby farms, had been pouring over her allowance (generous, but not in the face of the kinds of costs needed to help several families survive) to see where she could best use it to cushion the losses. Robin hadn’t killed the wolf, but he was the one the town guards had caught, helping a frail, shaking grandmother and child to the relative safety of the walls and some distant kin. His own kin had shaken their heads and scowled, but told him where to meet them, further down the road. Marian’s uncle was in the next town over, but she strode out into the street to demand shrilly to know what was going on. Robin’s knees bruised when they hit the ground, but it was Marian who flinched - later, he would puzzle over whether it had been in sympathy at the impact or at the idea that he was supposed to kneel in her presence. 

The town guards knew the edges of Marian’s charity, but they were her uncle’s men. She lifted her chin but knew they wouldn’t listen when she asked for their evidence, and folded her hands to give herself something to hold onto as they spoke of execution. The guards called the Bureau to come collect the captive, and Marian called in favours. Robin was grumpily trying to figure out if there was anything in his cell he could use to pick the lock when the key was slipped under the door with a note. When he snuck out, in the grey predawn gloom, Marian was waiting at the gate in a borrowed cloak, his clothes a careful bundle wrapped around a parcel of food and a new pair of gloves. All of the tears had been precisely mended. 

The Bureau asked questions, when they came, demanded answers, threatened, and Marian fumed.

They asked her nothing. They looked at her soft hands and moved carelessly on in their questioning. If they had thought to ask the servants if the lady had made any odd requests the day before, they would have heard only that the baker was to charge the mayor’s house a little extra for a few days, and use the difference to give an old woman and her granddaughter their bread free until they could get their feet under them, new to town and going through hard times. Her uncle fumed at the embarrassment, and Marian wondered if it had occurred to him to be embarrassed that nothing had been done until a vigilante saved their people instead of _them._

They met again in late spring, two years later. The Riding Hoods were laying low, several injured and ducking the Bureau’s investigations. Robin recognised the town on the horizon and wandered in, brazen and cautious with it. He didn’t know what he was looking for until he ran into a woman he recognised, hidden in a nondescript cloak but with her head held high. The guards hadn’t recognised him at the gate, but Marian had seen him smile his thanks as she saved his life. He didn’t ask why she had let him go, or how, or why she had flinched. He asked if the child had made it through the winter, if the woman had found a safe fire to huddle by, and she gave him an appraising look. She didn’t take him to see them, because that would be reckless and draw attention to the vulnerable. But she told him, and made him wait while she ducked into the bakery to buy them both hot buns to cradle while they walked.

She had been chafing at the walls more and more with each passing season, so she slipped out sometimes for the thrill of it. They met in a little copse of trees, and traded stories while Marian made her patchwork quilts. The second time they met, Robin brought a needle and thread, fingers rough and calloused but no less nimble than hers. They talked about seasons past, about people who needed help. Robin said his hands felt empty, and Marian didn’t tell him she knew what he meant. The way her palms felt cold more often than not wasn’t something he had the right to hear, not yet. Vulnerability had never been a skin Marian wore easily.

When the Riding Hoods moved on, Marian still went out to the little copse, and ran distracted fingers over the bow he’d carved into the trunk of a tree in an idle moment as she thought. 

Marian was nineteen when she stopped chafing at the walls, because when she was nineteen the walls were destroyed. Bandits raided their town, and she had not been there. She had been at a friend’s, in another town, and when they told her the news she went pale - they reassured her that her uncle had survived, and she pretended that was something that she had been worried about. Her uncle had ignored petitions to strengthen the walls for years, hadn’t recruited enough for the town guard and had refused to pay for training for the guards they did hire. Her uncle was safe but her people - her _people._

She hid out in her little copse, shaking herself awake at nights and staring blankly at the space that should have been the town. It wasn’t worth rebuilding, at least not yet. After the funerals, Marian had distributed her hoarded coins amongst the people who remained to help them in their way in new lives, and left. She would shake herself apart to live in the cosy house of a sympathetic friend who would tell her how very lucky she had been, hands empty because she had nothing to give. She didn’t want to feel responsible for people she had no power to protect, not again. 

  
On the other side of the mountains, Robin was staring at his useless, empty hands with more and more distaste with every village and isolated homestead they travelled by. When they slept on the floor of inns, he chopped wood for hours before sleeping, and listened to the villagers gossip - what they needed, what they wanted, the ebb and flow of favours and helping hands. He fell into arguments with the leaders of his band of Hoods on the regular, over near misses and the way he offered out spare jerky and dried blueberries so freely when they were around other people.

  
Robin was so very tired of travelling, of living from camp to scattered camp, of having to ignore every request for aid that didn’t have teeth and fur and silver arrows at its core. He left in bad blood, and it hurt. He was burning up the ties he’d had - most of them, anyway. One or two of the other Hoods went too, the ones who wanted something different, and they rode away with their backs held tall. Robin wasn’t sure where he was going for the first day, but he remembered the way leaves overhead muffled the rain, and ran fingertips over the arrows still slung from his saddle horn. He wasn’t a werewolf hunter anymore, but these arrowheads tore through Things as well as they did anything else.

  
The woods had been a place of peril for generations. They weren’t werewolf hunters anymore, but he told his rag tag band where they were headed with a light in his eyes, and they grinned dark and feral the way they had in so many hunts before.

Not all of Marian’s people allowed themselves to be left, to be let go. A young girl - a child still, but less of a child than she had been when she arrived clinging to her grandmother’s hand a scant three years earlier - in a deep russet cloak, eyes solemn and clutching at the hand of one of the old town guard. Will met Marian’s stare easily, face drawn. He had been one of her guards for the road, and had been the one who stood blank by her side as they were told their town was gone. He’d been the one who stood a careful three steps behind her while she gave her pretty little speech, empty words and empty hands.

(He had helped to dig through the rubble of the walls for the people who’d tried to defend their homes, and had given a count of the dead to her uncle. He’d given Marian their names, while she cut shredded cloth into squares for quilts. She had thought about using the materials from her home that the bandits hadn’t taken to make shrouds, but she was at her core practical. Her dead didn’t care what they were buried in; the living would get better use from her time. She had never been a sentimental child.)

Their little copse was barely a shelter, and there was only so long you could stare at the empty space on the horizon. They set out with vague plans of a town Will knew people in, of building a new life. They couldn’t afford inns, but they stopped at them anyway. Will chopped wood while Marian helped with whatever tasks she could. The no-nonsense women grimaced at her soft hands and the way they hesitated over chopping boards and brooms, but Liesel solemnly shadowed her, small hands nimble and already rough from chores.

Marian fumbled and learnt, and smiled in cold satisfaction when they first found an inn where her hands were quick enough on the kitchen knives to not raise questioning eyebrows. She and Liesel had settled down with their bowls of strew when Will ambled in, chatting to a lanky youth he would cheerfully explain had the exact same name. A familiar figure was striding behind them, and Robin paused when he saw Marian, puzzled and wary, concerned at the travel stains she’d never been permitted to have before.

Robin told them where he was going with a fire that none of Marian’s practical questions dimmed. She dreamt of snow falling through branches, soft and quiet, and in the morning she took Will aside. He grinned back with a light in his eyes that was a shadow of Robin’s, and Liesel shrugged when they told her of their change of plans.

When they caught up with Robin and his band along the road he grinned broadly, and drew both Will Scarletts into a conversation about woodcraft. Marian felt herself start to chafe, no questions laid at her stumbling feet, and curled her hands in her pockets. She would have no answers, she knew, so she made herself listen instead. When they set up camp, Robin dropped down next to her at the fire to help prepare a bland but serviceable supper, and asked if she knew how to shoot. 

The bow was polished wood and waxed string, unfamiliar and unwieldy in her hands, and none of the arrows struck home. But she rubbed her aching arms the next morning and collared the unfamiliar Will to ask about arm strength. He gave her some answers, then called over a gruff woman named Sue, who eyed Marian’s ill defined arms and still soft fingers and scoffed. But Marian met her gaze, chin lifted, and the woman dropped a few more pieces of advice as well, rolling her eyes. 

By the time they reached the woods, she could hit a large, stationary target. She couldn’t practice every day. Travel non-withstanding, arrows were precious and safe targets to practice with were rare. But she had strung the bow every morning it wasn’t raining, and drawn the string back to her ear, over and over. Sue scoffed and grimaced, and critiqued her stance absently. Robin cheerfully critiqued her too, and after the first time she snapped at him for lying to her didn’t give her empty praise. 

  
He stumbled though, sometimes, into the puzzled assumptions that she would know how to live like this. Robin had never known anyone not familiar with how to skin a rabbit before, or anyone older than Liesel who didn’t know how to light a campfire, or how to find North from the stars. In some ways, Marian preferred Sue’s brusque insults to his guilty apologies. She leant into them, cradled them close, a spiteful fire that powered her through unpleasant realities and lessons. She took the side glances of the others of the Riding Hoods who weren’t sure about this town girl in their midst and built them into armour against cold nights and long days in the rain.

They reached the woods and Marian eyed them warily. She could only just hit a stationary target, and there were Things lurking beneath the branches that made even the Hoods go quiet and cautious. Liesel pressed close and slipped a hand into hers. Will stood a careful three paces back, hand on the hilt of his technically stolen sword. They set up camp just within the trees, setting up crude branch traps so that anything sneaking up on them wouldn’t be able to do it silently. Robin and most of his small band spent their days melting into the trees to forage and hunt out nests of Things to clear. Marian practised with her bow and the rough target Robin had set up, and studied the foraged plants brought back to her until she could recognise them without help.

She graduated to moving targets through necessity - a Thing, too close to camp, Liesel frozen in fear, her hands empty but reaching for her weapon. Her second arrow caught it in a shifting limb, and Robin’s caught it through the centre. She cleaned off the arrows with fingers that didn’t tremble, and tucked them carefully into her quiver. She still spent all of her spare moments with her bow and a false target. Her first arrow had _missed._  

So had her second; she hadn’t been aiming at the limb.

The woods were a place of peril, but they started small. Their camp and the nearby stream became clear of nests. They learnt the deer trails in the undergrowth. Liesel scrambled up into the trees and scurried from limb to limb, and Robin threw his head back to laugh before following suit. Mari stopped measuring her progress by how far from the centre of the target her arrow lodged and started measuring by how far it was from where she had aimed. She took down game and didn’t flinch as she skinned it.

  
The Hoods weren’t a people used to strangers. Liesel they accepted easily, because they were used to children, but Will most of them were faintly suspicious of. He ignored them cheerfully until he snapped, a cycle that kept playing as they figured out his buttons and watched his reactions. Robin picked his brains about defences and organising watches for permanent settlements, got into evening arm wrestling matches that he won only most of the time. Marian watched, eyes sharp, and noted how by the third evening this happened a few of the Hoods were laughing and cheering on her Will instead of their own leader. 

The two Wills had become friends early, but Will was like Robin - an easy cheer, and a confident awareness of his own abilities. He only had to get the old riding Hoods to recognise them. Marian was confident of her abilities, but she was more aware of their limits. She didn’t try to be friendly, but she squared her shoulders when the Hoods fell into contests and shows of strength, and asked to learn. They didn’t want her there, but she would make them appreciate her. She set herself against every doubt and assumption the way she had set herself against her uncle’s coddling walls.

It was a hard life, but Robin talked low and warm around the fire, and they turned towards him like flowers to the sun. He spoke of safety, of snow falling quietly between the trees, of a place they could protect. It was a fool’s errand, they knew that, they _did_ \- but perhaps they were all fools, then.

It was summer when Robin met the half ogre man in the Woods. They stumbled into the camp, Robin trying to support the weight of a man who stood heads taller than him and pounds heavier, his skin mottled grey and green where it wasn’t stained red. Marian was moving before the first questions were shouted, reaching for the bag of bandages and bindings and snapping at Liesel to fetch her water. 

It was a close run thing, but the wounds healed clean and their new guest was sitting up cautiously a few days later. He watched them warily and gave them the story in a few blunt words - angry, frightened villagers, a string of missing people and a clearly half monster man who’d been too slow to run and too afraid of causing real harm to fight back

(“They were _kids_. They were scared, they thought I - they thought I was going to eat them”)

Marian changed the bandages with hands that had a respectable layer of callous, now. She jerked her head at Much, one of Robin’s old riding Hoods who’d been a touch quicker than the rest to decide she was as serious about this as the rest of them, and he pottered over with a half bowl of soup. 

“Get that down you, and if it stays we’ll see about getting you more of a full portion. What’s your name, then?” He took a cautious sip, watching her warily. She could feel other eyes on her, suspicious, but Robin was nodding along at her side, not intervening, not pushing her gently aside to take back authority even when she was offering up their hard won food and a tacit invitation to stay. 

“John Little, ma'am.”

So, of course, they called him Little John. He was a gentle giant, they found, able to break heads easily and reluctant to do so, using his strength to haul wood and give Liesel piggy back rides through the trees around the camp. He and Robin became fast friends, but he would sling his arm over Marian’s shoulders just as casually, no cautious side stepping around her until he got her measure, no queries as to why a soft woman like her was doing with this band of ruffians.

(“He is an _injured person_ ”, Marian had hissed when one of the old Hoods muttered about monsters and wasted resources, her patient conscious but only barely under her cool, work roughened hands. Little John had a good measure of her before he even knew her name, and he figured quickly that she was there because she wanted to be, because she belonged and was gong to carve a space for herself)

They weren’t the only ones to seek shelter in the trees, but they were the only ones to do so seeking peace. The traps gave warning, but they also told bandits that there was something to see, something to find.

Robin and the Hoods came running at the noise, but there was nothing left for them to do. The camp was mostly destroyed, but the only bodies were ones they had no names for. Marian unstrung her bow and was partly through extracting an arrow from a corpse when her mind caught up with her, and she vomited into a bush. When she made her way shakily back to what had been the centre fire of their little camp, Robin was cleaning off the tips of her arrows with the same care he did his own after each hunt. Much was grumbling as he tried to right their stores of food, muttering about caches, but he gave her a pleased grin and launched into a recounting of her quick hands and swift eye. 

“And what if it had been one of us, innocently tripping on the way back?” Asked Robin, laughing, giddy with relief and pride. Marian tucked the last arrow back into her quiver, fingers not trembling at all, now. 

“None of you have been innocent since the day you were born. If you’re foolish enough to trip into your own traps and then march straight on in, you deserve what you get,” she sniffed, “though I suppose we could also have some kind of signal for ‘don’t shoot me’”

(Marian was actually quite good at imitating bird calls, to the surprise of everyone except Will, Liesel and Robin. Robin wasn’t surprised, because Robin was rapidly forming the opinion that Mari could do anything she wanted, probably, but he laughed in delight at her repertoire and begged the story of why she’d learnt off of her while they repaired shelters.)

They made the woods theirs, piece by piece, clearing out nests of Things and bandit hidey holes, learning the paths through the trees and where they could make a decent camp on the mossy floor.

They made the woods theirs, bit by bit, and people began to whisper about the people of the woods, wraiths of wood and shadow.

Robin laughed so hard he doubled over  the first time someone told him one of these stories, a trembling young woman disguised not very convincingly as a boy who had taken one look at Marian’s raised eyebrow and the ease with which she stood, and dropped the charade to ramble out her story. He laughed and it was a bright, infectious sound. Marian’s lips twitched despite herself. 

People learnt, gradually, that they were flesh and blood not spirits of bark and moss. They called them the Merry Men, and Marian and Sue rolled their eyes at each other across the fire.

Still, it was useful, sometimes, to be underestimated. It meant when Will Scarlett, the other Will Scarlett, and a runty stray who’d followed the rumours who thankfully wasn’t called _Will_ but was regrettably called _Bill_ , got themselves captured in the fringes of the woods by a couple of Bureau goons, Marian could slip easily into town.

Her skin crawled as the gates closed behind her, but she remembered how to walk these kinds of street - how to step purposefully, to look busy and competent and not particularly interesting so that she didn’t attract attention and didn’t merit a remark. Just another woman out for her shopping, nothing of interest. Just another woman scurrying by with a list of household tasks and a smile for the Bureau sanctioned guards watching out for any troublemakers, hood tugged low and scarf tucked in against the chill autumn breeze.

She slipped into the town and into the holding cells, and they slipped out again, all four of them. The town was laid out a bit differently, but the Bureau law enforcement set their holding cells up the same everywhere in the mountains. 

Beyond the trees she was underestimated and overlooked, but the Merry Men had learned to respect her over months and years of bare camps and long winters, scarce food and worrying coughs. They had learnt to respect her aim, her ruthless pragmatism, her stubborn tenacity and cutting tongue. They still called her Maid, but now it was a joke and a title, not a mocking honorific.

Most of the people who tracked them down they sent on, because they were largely kids who thought it all sounded like fun and games and didn’t understand how tight to the line between life and death they walked. But their numbers grew, strays who had nowhere left to go and who knew exactly what they were signing themselves up for. 

(Alan didn’t seem like a man with nothing left until he knew you well enough to break down, to talk about his lovely sweetheart, how she sang just as sweetly as him and liked to make golden flowers bloom on her fingers while she did. She had gone missing in the night, and he could find no trace of her, just rumours, just nightmares. Muchly pressed warm mugs of herbal tea into his palms when he woke in the night, handed him big floury biscuits, and Marian sat with him by the fire to think about their losses until the tears were dry on both their cheeks.)

Marian wasn’t sure when, exactly, she had started to love Robin, just that she did. Maybe she had loved him from the moment his first question was whether the old woman and child he’d brought in had found their feet. Maybe it was when he gave her a bow and a target, saw her empty hands and gave her something to hold onto. Maybe there hadn’t been a moment, just the gradual realisation that he laughed like he was made of light, and she wanted to always hear him laughing. 

They danced around it until Marian took a bullet to the shoulder, a Bureau League trying to capture the dangerous vigilantes and smart enough to shoot for the leader. She had her hood up, and they thought she was Robin, because she was shooting with perfect aim and people were listening to her commands - they thought she was Robin, thought she was the leader of this small band of Merry Men, and they were only half wrong. Much and Little carried her to their camp, careful not to leave a trail, and Robin went pale and still.

Her hands were empty when she woke, but she reached for his and held them tight.

—

After watching the latest three intruders for a while to make sure they were unlikely to be a threat, Marian stepped out of the trees with her bow ready. She was flanked by two or the Merry Men, and a couple more were hiding where they could run ahead with a warning or send a few helpful arrows from an unexpected direction. 

“Who are you, and what do you want in our woods?”

There was a man, obviously a mage, gasping for breath as he curled in the hollow of an old trees roots, a girl with close cropped hair and a haunted look crouched by him, seemingly harmless except for the way she was balanced on her toes and had rested her shield instinctively where it would still provide some cover for them both. 

The chatterbox of a boy peered at Marian with undisguised interest and an apparent lack of awareness about how much danger he was in. Mari felt herself scowling. You couldn’t be that oblivious if you didn’t have the faith behind you that you were never really going to be harmed, because you were _special_. You didn’t look that brightly at people with weapons pointed at you unless you thought you were a fairy tale hero, too precious to burn. 

Children who believed they were safe and untouchable died. Children shouldn’t play at being heroes in the real world, where swords drew blood and battles left scars.

“You know, back home? We say your territory is only as big as the area you can keep safe.” Marian raised one delicate eyebrow, unimpressed. Flippancy at the end of an arrow wasn’t bravery, it was foolishness and arrogance, and she had no patience for either.

“And _everything_ beneath these trees is ours, boy, so answer the question.”

Fat flakes of snow, the first that year, were drifting gently throughly the branches overhead. She would know Jack Farris in the spring rain, drawing on years of family herb lore to find early spring forage, catching his thumb with a hammer as he learnt to make a roof steep enough for winter in the golden autumn sun, through the long days and sweltering heat of a summer siege - but she would always remember him standing in the falling snow, his hands empty.

 


End file.
